Car-as-a-service era is here

What if you were able to try out driverless features in your car for
one month at no charge? If you liked it a lot, you could buy an
annual subscription. When your subscription runs out, you could
renew it through your smartphone. On a weekend, you might want to
upgrade the driverless feature from “commuter style” to “race track
style”, and be driven at breakneck speeds on a racetrack.

Google’s driverless
car, which was awarded a driving license in Nevada in
May 2012, is a guide for the technology-driven transformation of the
automobile industry. Observers are dreaming up possibilities
as exemplified by “if you give a car the abilities of race car
drivers (instead of the average driver) and combine them with
“conservative software” used for standard driving then you can
develop a safer driving experience.”

Such possibilities are endless. At their core, they speak to the
looming transformation of business models in the automotive
industry. A business that is characterized by occasional vehicle
sales today is soon to become the “car as a service,” creating an
on-going relationship between auto manufacturers and consumers with
recurring revenues from sales of apps and services. The recipe
driving the transformation of automotive manufacturers consists of
essential ingredients, “platform + apps + service.” This is seen in
Google’s driverless features, which were retrofitted onto a Toyota
Prius and enabled by a combination of hardware platform (e.g. laser
radars), breakthrough software and Internet-enabled services.

Until recently, comparing Apple to Ford would have been dismissed as
a meaningless exercise. However, Apple’s formula of “platform + apps
+ services,” exemplified by the iPhone platform + iPhone Apps +
iTunes content, serves as an indicator of the payoff that automotive
manufacturers can expect, if replicated correctly. The table below
shows that Ford and Apple are roughly similar by revenue. However,
Apple’s market capitalization per dollar of revenue (3.1 in the
table below) is 10 times that of Ford’s.

Despite this difference, these types of returns are very much within
reach, and Ford, in particular, is heading in that direction.

Car servicing is the very important service as far as the car ownership is concern. People using car needs to properly taking care of their car. They need to take a servicing of their car in regular basis. So it is very important to take care of your car. http://hansamotors.com/

We already have apps for our cars - fuel and audio, reparis, resprays; the auto manufacturers don't have the market monopoly that Apple have - partly because they gave it up and partly because they are so bad at service we use other companies; Apple will go their way rather than the other way about.